ThoughtRiver, the legal AI contract review and compliance platform, has been selected by global renewable materials company Stora Ensoto run trials to pre-screen a wide range of sales agreements with the aim of reducing the time it takes to review its contracts.

The Nordic company Stora Enso employs around 26,000 people and is publicly listed in Helsinki and Stockholm. In this regard it is both large enough to see a significant volume of contracts that would otherwise slow down the inhouse legal team; and given that its shareholders don’t want to see money wasted on inefficient processes, they will no doubt welcome the opportunity to drive the transformation of one of the legal team’s work streams, in this case contract review.

ThoughtRiver software interprets key risk issues in a contract, applying corporate policies in order to assign an overall risk score to a contract, automating the human triaging process. Contracts that appear to diverge from the company’s ‘playbook’ can then be fast-tracked to human review, while the majority – as is often the case – do not need detailed human review and therefore can be consented to without wasting the legal team’s valuable time.

The UK-based company said that ‘with research suggesting up to 40% of lawyer time is wasted on low value issues’ their technology informs legal teams about ‘which contracts to look at and which issues to focus on, without having to read them all first’.

Christian Swartling, Lead Counsel, Legal Services, at Stora Enso said: ‘We are pleased to collaborate with ThoughtRiver and look forward to working together.’

‘We have been looking at AI for while, but this is the first application we have seen that promises to do the initial reviews and pre-screening that hopefully fits our processes,‘ he added.

Tim Pullan, Founder and CEO at ThoughtRiver, commented: ‘We are excited to be working with one of the world’s most innovative renewable materials companies. We look forward to helping them identify the risk and value contained in their contracts.’